Roland Hinterhölzl (University of Venice)

Title: Complementizer Agreement and Referential Anchoring: from Movement to Agreement

Abstract: 

It is generally assumed that a clause is temporally and modally anchored by the inflectional properties of the finite verb:

Tense connects the event expressed by the verb to the speech time

Mood indicates whether the event expressed by the verb is related to a situation in the actual world or to a situation in world that is distant from the actual word

I will argue in this paper that

A)       the subject plays a crucial role in this anchoring relation, for two reasons:

a) semantic: Nominal expressions analysed as relations between individuals and
events are   referential and can be anaphoric and refer back to a topical situation

b) syntactic: I assume that the values for reference time and speech time are assigned
in Fin0 in the C-domain; for reasons of locality  it is the subject in [Spec,TP] that
enters into an Agree relation with Fin0 rather than T0

B)        Complementizer Agreement (CA) is a grammatical reflex of this licensing relation

a)         Double Agreement (DA) is the result of movement of a subject clitic or a correlate of    the subject to Fin0 (since the subject is unable to move to [Spec,FinP] in embedded clauses)

b)        standard CA results from a reanalysis of DA as an Agree relation between Fin0 and the             subject in [Spec,TP]